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Battalion Of Saints - “Second Coming” lp

Here’s a platter of crucial early 80’s San Diego punk. Similar to a lot of other big USHC bands from this time period but distinguished by the batshit crazy vocal attack of George Anthony, who comes shrieking like a coked up maniac (probably was) on the opener, My Mind’s Diseased. It’s probably the best track on the album, and it’s surely his best cut vocally, but let that not diminish your view of the rest of this rock solid classic. If you care for the likes of Government Warning or Direct Control these days, you ought to know this one, because it’s basically the template for what they’ve been doing (hardcorepunkmetal). Yes the music has a bit of heavy metal color to it, but with a limited amount of technical prowess, esepecially from the drummer who often employs the well liked “D-Beat”. Actually this lp is a lot like what the post Discharge band Broken Bones really ended up sounding like. Only I happen to think this is a bit more ripping and rocked out. Less stiff, you know?

Holy Vision has some cool shredding and soloing from guitarist Chris Smith (not the same as Integrity/Inmates/Keelhaul member Chris Smith), dipping between the flashy showoff heavy metal side, and the string grating random noise hardcore side. No More Lies opens with the riff from (I think) some early Motorhead song, before busting into another call response style hardcore attack that should fill your meat and potatoes fix quite well. Actually a lot of the songs kind of combine the speed and thickness of classic Motorhead, with the kind of American beach punk feel of The Adolecents and all that. The album even closes with a fairly good cover of Motorhead’s “Ace Of Spades”, and I don’t take Motorhead covers lightly.

The cover is some awesome Mad Marc Rude work with the classic “skeletons emerging from the ruins” theme, found on so many good punk and metal lps.

Maybe I will have a Nervous Breakdown about someone getting this Nervous Breakdown for an old song…

Snowed in today… how about a classic:
Sarcofago - “I.N.R.I.”

As far as I can tell from the information in the auction this is the original Cogumelo pressing of the album with an orange tinted cover photo, (COG 007).

A lot of necrolords out there love to throw this one in the ring as a band that helped lay the foundations for modern black metal. Honestly I think it’s a bit exaggerated. 2 notable aspects of this record later adopted by black metal bands:

1) corpse painted members (it’s not like they were the first band to do this)
2) heavy use of blast beats, even in places where a more standard fast beat would do

Riffwise there’s really very little in common with what’s considered “black metal” now , and it’s a lot more like what you’d consider “black thrash”, sort of a post thrash metal grey area between black and death metal. Somewhere between a mix of Hellhammer, Slayer, Bathory, Possessed, and Sodom. As for the blasting, it’s helped along considerably by some kind of heavy studio magic. I can’t say if it’s triggering or if it’s an extremely heavily gated/EQ’d sound, but it’s definitely the most processed snare I’ve ever heard on a metal record. I honestly thought it was a drum machine the first time I listened, also partially due to the relative loudness of the snare in the drum mix. It’s much louder than any of the other drums, and the cymbals are barely audible at points, giving it a very artificial, and drum machine-ish sound. It’s emphasized more by the relatively high number of beats-per-minute due to the blasting. Drummer D.D. Crazy, despite the weird drum sound though, does come pretty hard on this and really does set the pace for a lot of extreme metal thereafter. He also went on to play on another landmark Brazilian lp, Sex Trash’s “Sexual Carnage”, another album your Mom should never know about.

There’s just no denying I.N.R.I. is an extreme and landmark album. The riffs, while inspired by the bands mentioned above, seem determined to make absolutely no concessions for anything other than all out brutality. Whereas Possessed were getting experimental via Larry Lalonde, Slayer were working with a major label, and most of Hellhammer were making avant-garde doom in Celtic Frost, Sarcofago are pushing in the opposite directions here. Determined to violate the listener with stomach churning tasteless thrash that in the end sounds most like the early Sodom offerings beefed up to much more disgusting and focused levels of evil. If extreme metal that followed in subsequent years is comparable to the horror movie genre, then I.N.R.I. is Last House On The Left. A completely shocking and new level of sickening garbage to inspire future death and black metal shut-ins and freaks. Even though it’s technically been surpassed since it was released, it still remains gruesome and affecting. In the 80’s parents were worried about bands like Judas Priest or maybe Slayer, but if they’d been aware there were records being released that sounded like this I really think a lot of them would have died of shock. Vocalist “Antichrist” (birth name: Wagner Lamounier – currently a professor of economic science and applied statistic at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, Brazil), shrieks, howls, and gurgles his way through numerous new (at the time) lows in the lyrical department (I’ll leave it to you to google for lyrics). Vocals drown in tons of canned reverb at some points, and at others double and triple over pitch shifted versions of themselves. At this point Lamounier also began cultivating a long standing feud with his former band Sepultura, probably the biggest band in the Brazilian metal underground at the time. Eventually this also led to encompass Ratos De Porao (who took the Sepultura side).